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The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

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Re: The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

#151

Post by BlueTemplar »

norman784 wrote: post #48
Uehreka wrote: post #14

So tonight I watched a 1080p pirated copy of Spiderman: Far From Home. And I gotta say, it was kinda crap. The sound would randomly cut out, and the compression was absolute ass (it was the perfect artifact to show people when explaining “not all 1080p’s are created equal”, especially when they’re fighting the water elemental) I really do think that DRM has won folks. We have seen the 4K HDR future, and what we find…

If you are linux user you cannot consume legal content (that you paid for) in high quality, even when you are paying for it, iirc Prime gives you 720p and Netflix 1080p.

Also in the other cases where it's about VLC, then in any quality, really, unless you somehow managed to pay a license to be able to do it :

https://wiki.videolan.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions/#Legal_...

> What about personal/commercial usage?

> Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are mostly the MPEG style codecs.

> With many products the producer pays the license body (in this case MPEG LA) so the user (commercial or personal) does not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 – which it uses in most of these cases) cannot do this because they are Free and Open Source implementations of these codecs. The software is not sold, and therefore the end-user becomes responsible for complying with the licensing and royalty requirements. You will need to contact the licensor on how to comply with these licenses.

> This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal enjoyment ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the Internet.

And the main reason that they haven't been bothered about making software that allows this :

https://www.videolan.org/legal.html

> Patents and codec licenses

> Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable

Re: The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

#152

Post by Skyy93 »

fleddr wrote: post #86

"The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices." Yes...and? The problem with this discussion is that it looks at this issue from one side only. It is kind of implied that content providers and creators are bad guys whilst us consumers are clearly the good guys, needlessly oppressed and restricted in our supposed "right" to consume all of the content in the world in the…

I think the problem is also the loss of control. I talked to someone today about this issue (for me its an issue) and this person did not even know what DRM is. If you do not know about something you can not build an opinion for or against it. Also you do not know if there is an alternative or another way. Therefore the dictation of hard- and software without the user really knowing whats going on is an actual issue. Content provider also do not want to inform their customer because perhapts they are no customers in the future if they know about their actual business process and monetizing.

Re: The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

#154

Post by mananaysiempre »

progbits wrote: post #99

Off-topic but the archive.org page is unusable for me on mobile due to the donation banner: the close button is obscured by the timeline and can't be clicked, "maybe later" replaces it with a different banner asking for contact info which I also can't close. I love IA and have donated to them before but this is slowly sliding into the dark UX patterns making web unusable.

The post is still up on the author’s self-hosted blog, no archive needed: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1363672582&count=1

Re: The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

#155

Post by contravariant »

pmontra wrote: post #134
_0ffh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, though I prefer an alternative "theological" view: (1) Property rights exist to peacefully resolve conflicts over naturally scarce resources (2) Information resources are not naturally scarce

I try to be the Devil's advocate. The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the time of the people that created that song and that movie. That's is part of the cost of production. This is similar to there are millions of houses but only a few in the most scenic places. Want one of them, pay more. It could be the same for the most popular songs and movies. The time of their creators is more valuable tha…

Yeah reality is weird. I often find myself thinking copyright and DRM should obviously be advantageous to the authors only to subsequently recall that before the printing press predictably made copyright a thing there was a much greater demand for new manuscripts as they would quickly lose their value once in circulation [1].

[1]: https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-and... (it also talks about NFTs but that part is not relevant for this discussion)

Re: The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

#156

Post by toraway1234 »

kube-system wrote: post #7

I also don’t think it’s even necessary to prevent copyright infringement to achieve a goal of effectively steering people towards paid sources. I often hear arguments that its “easier to pirate movies than use DRM’d software”. But I don’t think this is actually the case for the average non-tech-savvy person. If you can operate a torrent client or even know what one is, you are much savvier than the average Netflix/Ro…

> DRM means that there isn’t a point-and-click app for my mom to send her sister a movie.

"magistv"

Re: The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

#157

Post by coldpie »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #141
sandworm101 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> (3) economic side effects of laws are incidental. Not with intellectual property. This isn't ten-commandments stuff, protections against evil. Intellectual property law is an openly commercial law meant to increase the profitability of innovations. I remember an article from way back about what the Bible would think of copyright "piracy". It is such modern set of laws that anyone mentioned in the bible would proba…

I agree that the purpose of copyright is not moral rights, even in theory. But I disagree that the theoretical purpose is profit (i.e. economic benefit to the creator). The idea (again, this is just in theory) is economic benefit to society overall. The idea is that if there's no copyright then creators would have no economic incentive to create anything, so they wouldn't bother. Profit to copyright owners is just a…

> The idea is that if there's no copyright then creators would have no economic incentive to create anything, so they wouldn't bother.

And yet, we've had creative works from all of human history, despite copyright being barely a hundred or two years old, and our modern effectively-infinite conception of copyright is only now reaching 50 years old. This theory doesn't hold up to even a couple seconds of scrutiny.

Re: The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

#158

Post by Kon-Peki »

zinekeller wrote: post #136
gcr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonprofits gotta solicit donations. NPR does this, PBS' infamous pledge week does this. This isn't "falling," it's an old practice.

I don't know IA's budget (might be just the pandemic has tolled its finances), but I have reservations about Wikimedia's use of money. (Only the main foundation, others like the German affiliate is efficient about money and except for 2020 has a surplus which obviously went to cover inevitable shortfalls.)

IA is fighting a lawsuit over its pandemic digital book lending service - where they begged for a lawsuit by deliberately offering unlimited lending of scanned books. This is obviously something they must win, so it's going to get really expensive.

A quick search shows that the lawsuit is currently in the discovery phase, which is around the time that lawsuits start to get really, really expensive. And apparently the two sides are fighting, leading the judge to extend discovery while they work out the issues. $$$$

Re: The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

#159

Post by Gormo »

pmontra wrote: post #134
_0ffh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, though I prefer an alternative "theological" view: (1) Property rights exist to peacefully resolve conflicts over naturally scarce resources (2) Information resources are not naturally scarce

I try to be the Devil's advocate. The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the time of the people that created that song and that movie. That's is part of the cost of production. This is similar to there are millions of houses but only a few in the most scenic places. Want one of them, pay more. It could be the same for the most popular songs and movies. The time of their creators is more valuable tha…

> The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the time of the people that created that song and that movie. That's is part of the cost of production.

That's not really valid, though. Time is not the thing being exchanged -- it's impossible to do that -- so isn't a resource, scarce or otherwise, in the sense we mean. On top of that, the previous commenter made an error -- property rights aren't a solution to disputes over scarce resources, they're a solution to disputes over rival resources, regardless of how scarce they are. Since time is not transferable, it's not rival.

More to your point, though, the consumption of time engaged in a productive activity is a capital expenditure, with the risk borne by those expending it, as with any other capital expenditure -- your investment lets you bring a product to market, but no one is obligated to do business with you, and whether people compensate you enough to generate a sufficient return is up to them.

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